


Becoming

by Saucery



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Brain Surgery, Coitus Interruptus, Companionable Snark, Dorks in Love, Drama, Drift Side Effects, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Guilt, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, I'M IN TEARS AND YOU WILL BE TOO, Kissing, Literary References & Allusions, Loneliness, M/M, Making Out, Metaphors, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Mutual Pining, Oblivious, Pop Culture, Post-Canon, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Redemption, References to Shakespeare, Romance, SO MUCH TRUE LOVE, Science Fiction, Shame, So Married, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-29 23:03:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14483130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saucery/pseuds/Saucery
Summary: “We are always becoming. Until the day we die, we’re becoming.” Hermann gripped Newt’s hands tightly enough to bruise. “You’re still becoming, Newt. For a while, you were becoming something else, but now you can go back to becoming you.”





	Becoming

* * *

 

Hermann was there when Newt woke up. Of course he was there; he was always there, whether Newt was awake or asleep, alive or dead, sane or mad, himself or—

Or whatever he had been. For the last couple of years.

“Are you a hallucination?” Newt croaked. His throat felt like crushed glass, like liquid hadn’t gone down it in months. Who knew? Maybe it hadn’t. “’Cause I’m not sure you aren’t a hallucination.”

“I’m real,” Hermann replied. If Newt felt like crushed glass, Hermann _looked_ like crushed glass—like he’d been ground to pieces under the heel of a Kaiju.

“That’s what all the hallucinations say.”

A tired smile curled the corner of Hermann’s mouth. His thin, lovely mouth.

Newt looked away. And plucked at his blanket. It was a standard-issue PPDC blanket, the same stamped, dull green blanket he’d slept under when he lived on-base, the same blanket he’d wrapped himself up in when he was up all night with Hermann in the chilly lab, arguing about stupid shit while also being stupidly, humiliatingly happy. The bliss of the ignorant. He’d hated Hermann for that, for lowering his IQ by a dozen points just by being in Newt’s general vicinity and being insufferably adora—

Insufferable.

“Why are you still here?” Newt mumbled. “No, more to the point, why am _I_ still here? Why haven’t I been put down like the sick dog I am? I had the neurological equivalent of rabies, Hermann. I should’ve been executed on the spot… and then harvested for tissue.”

“It would’ve made more sense to keep you alive and _then_ harvest you for tissue,” Hermann said dryly, resuming their habitual banter like they didn’t have a proverbial ocean between them. “To observe in real time how your brain interacted telepathically with the Kaiju’s.”

In. Suffer. Able.

Hermann was, as ever, such a know-it-all. Beautiful, bedamned, bedeviling man.

But had Newt not proven to be the devil? Incarnate, even?

“I did have to argue for your survival,” Hermann confessed, like it was nothing, like Newt owing him this was nothing. “But I didn’t have to argue much. The PPDC is not about killing humans, Newt. It’s about killing Kaiju.”

“I was a Kaiju.”

“No.” Hermann met Newt’s eyes squarely. “You weren’t.”

Newt’s fists clenched instinctively. He unclenched them with an exhausting measure of will, will he’d been incapable of exercising when those same fists had been wrapped around Hermann’s _throat_ , god, no, he’d almost lost Hermann, almost _killed_ him—

And all the while, with Alice whispering in his mind: _You can’t have him anyway. If you can’t have him, why not kill him? Punish him for not being yours. Punish him. Punish him—_

“Newt.” Hermann recalled Newt to the present. “Are you…” He coughed awkwardly.

“Am I what?” Newt laughed humorlessly. “Okay? Sane? Intact? The correct answer is D), none of the above.”

It was true. Newt was alone again. So alone in his head, now, his own words the only things that rattled around in his empty skull, like coins in a beggar’s cup. Alice’s whispering—a siren song that had, at the end, had transformed into a continuous, agonizing, irresistible screech, calling on him to dash himself against the rocks of his own futility—had been silenced once and for all.

Newt knew he should be relieved. Wouldn’t anyone be relieved, to be rid of their resident evil overlord?

But instead he felt _robbed_ , his mind grasping for a torn connection, reaching endlessly like a hand into an abyss, nothingness all around him, a desert within him, his heart filled with sand.

That was why it had all begun, hadn’t it? The loneliness of not having Hermann in his mind after they’d drifted, and the stark, solitary knowledge that he’d never have that again, that he _couldn’t_ have it again. If he did, Hermann would see what Newt was hiding in there—the blistering, burning thirst for touch, for Hermann’s touch. The images would spill like old blood from Newt’s subconscious, warm and coppery and tinged faintly red—pornographic images of Newt riding Hermann in a rumpled bed and Hermann gazing up at him with such adoration, such _devotion_ —

But Newt couldn’t have had that. So he settled for having someone, anyone, in his mind. Even if he was devoured in the process. Better to be devoured, to be destroyed, than to be without what he truly wanted.

“Newt…” Hermann shifted his chair closer to the bunk.

Newt flinched when the chair’s wheels squeaked.

Hermann frowned. “You’re still unstable.”

“No kidding, genius.” Newt jabbed a thumb at the subtly beeping equipment he was hooked up to. “My vitals are shot. My brain’s been through the blender. My psyche is like a Jackson Pollock rendition of every Alien movie ever.”

“Jackson Pollock was dead before the Alien movies ever came out.”

“Oh, shut up.” _Don’t. Don’t ever shut up. I couldn’t stand it if you did._

“You ought to know,” Hermann retorted. “You were the one who introduced me to the glory that was Ellen Ripley over the course of a long, glorious movie night.”

Newt nodded smugly. “Our movie nights were the best.”

“That, or they were systematic torture. There really was no in-between.”

“Please. You loved _The Room_.”

“If by ‘loved’ you mean ‘scratched my own eyeballs out,’ then, yes, I loved it.”

“Hey, at least you get what it’s like to wanna scratch your eyeballs out,” Newt joked, but it emerged as a rasp. A desperate, longing rasp. “It’s so fucking quiet inside me, man. I’m going crazy. Again.”

“It took eight weeks of almost nonstop cranial surgery to unhook some of the biochemical and physical bonds that the Kaiju’s brain had formed with yours, but…” Hermann sucked in a breath. “But there is more to your treatment than that. The psychiatrist said, and I concur—”

“You consulted a psychiatrist about me? What could a shrink do for an unconscious man?”

“No, I consulted the psychiatrist about me,” Hermann corrected softly. “She just happened to have some advice to offer about you.”

Newt blinked. And blinked again. “Why would you need a psychiatrist?”

Hermann began ticking off the points on his fingers. “Depression. Suicidal ideation. The recurrent and increasingly convincing notion of killing myself if I didn’t get to speak to you again.”

Newt stared.

And reeled.

And stared.

And reeled some more.

Had he—all this time, had he not been _alone_ in his aching? In his yearning?

No. Surely not. What Hermann was experiencing was likely some manner of convoluted guilt, tangled as inextricably with the Gottlieb Savior Complex as Alice had once been tangled with Newt’s warped mind.

“You’re talking yourself out of believing me even now, aren’t you?” Hermann reached for Newt, slowed down when Newt flinched once more, and gradually, carefully brought Newt’s folded hands up to his face, gently pressing them to his lips. Hermann’s eyelashes fluttered against Newt’s knuckles, and Newt quivered. “I missed you,” Hermann said, and he sounded—he sounded fucking _wrecked_. “I’ve been missing you for so long. Ever since we drifted. No, before. Much before.” A shaky exhalation, a gust of unbelievable heat against Newt’s wrist. “Always.”

_Always_.

Newt gasped. And gasped again, because his lungs were out of practice, damn it, and Hermann wasn’t even being considerate enough to let a patient recover.

When Hermann lowered Newt’s hands and settled them back onto the sheets, Newt wondered why Hermann was letting go, but then Newt heard himself mumbling, “Stop. Hermann, _stop_. Please…”

Why was he asking Hermann to stop?

Oh, yeah. Because Hermann was a hallucination. This whole incident? Clearly a hallucination. Newt wasn’t confused about the nature of reality anymore, like he had been with Alice. Now, he was painfully, electrifyingly aware of how unreal all of this was. Because it had to be.

“Begone, fair spirit.” Newt shooed feebly at Hermann and at Hermann’s swiftly rising eyebrow. “Get thee hence to thy cowslip’s bell.”

Hermann’s eyebrow had now taken up residence at his hairline. “Are you equating me with Shakespeare’s Ariel? Me, a man who can scarcely walk, with a spirit that is the very essence of movement and flight?”

“Hush, you. Don’t question my literary allusions.”

“All right. If I’m Ariel, then let me speak as Ariel does.” Hermann reached out to hold Newt’s hands again—Newt’s silly, trembling hands, that wouldn’t quit trembling even when Newt glared at them. “Do you love me, master? No?”

It was… It was a joke. It had to be a joke. Yet Hermann’s eyes were as calm as they were solemn, as dark and transparent as a shard of midnight. There was a strange serenity to the cast of his features, a kind of inevitability, the ease of a man who had finally ceased struggling against the tide of destiny and was allowing it, one lap of water at a time, to take him out to sea.

_We’ll both drown there, Hermann_ , Newt wanted to say. _I’ve already drowned there. Don’t make me drag you down with me_. But Newt onlyblurted: “Don’t go around throwing the ‘L’ word like it’s nothing.”

Hermann’s mouth quirked. His goddamned distracting mouth. “The L Word…?”

“Would you stop dredging up our movie nights? It’s making you an awfully authentic hallucination.”

“Why, thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment. Are you telling me that all this time, you were feeling what I—what I—”

“I thought we shared that feeling. But before I could act on it, we got caught up in saving the world, and then you left me and started talking about this girlfriend of yours, and who could’ve imagined your girlfriend was…”

“A telepathic extraterrestrial villain straight out of a Star Trek episode?”

Hermann blinked. “Original series or…?”

“ _Yeah_ , the original series, dude. What are you, a philistine? Did our movie nights mean nothing to you?”

And Hermann was smiling at him again. That same tired curl of a smile, insubstantial as a note of music and just as difficult to trace. If Newt were to trace it with his thumb, would he be able to discern it? If he were to kiss it—

No. That way lay madness. He’d been down that way before. In his head.

“You’re back,” Hermann said, hushed and quiet, like it was a prayer. “You’re actually back.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘actually’? Are you hallucinating now, too? Because l gotta say, I’ve never had a hallucination that hallucinated, before. That is some next level shit.”

“I believe you’ve been through all the levels of shit.”

“You bet I have. I’m _Inception_ ’s alternate and far less optimistic ending.”

“I thought you were fed up with our references to movie night.”

“Only if you make ’em. I can make ’em just fine.”

“Hypocrite.”

“Hey, you didn’t fall for my sincerity.” Newt gulped. “Just say it, Hermann. I was never good enough for you—and now, I’m even less of—of—” Newt’s sentences were cracking, splitting right down the middle, like dried bones. The bones he deserved to be. He didn’t deserve to be sitting here, healed and chatty, bantering with Hermann like he’d never betrayed him. “I… You said I was a good man. You were wrong.”

“You _are_ a good man.”

“Then you’re a better man. You didn’t break under the weight of everything, Hermann. I did.”

“You were possessed by an ancient, incredibly powerful telepathic entity.”

“Or it could just be a particularly creative case of Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

Hermann glowered at him.

“What? Don’t tell me your psychiatrist didn’t mention _that_ possibility.”

“Only as what an alternative explanation would have been for the otherwise physical, discernible tampering of your brain’s latent psionic centers, visible on every scanner. If you hadn’t been meddled with—”

“Meddled with? What was I, a virgin bride? I volunteered. That’s what you don’t want to accept, Hermann. I. Volunteered.”

“No, you didn’t, damn you!”

“Ooooh. You must be angry. You’re cussing at me. You _should_ just be breaking up with me.”

“Ah-ha!” Hermann shouted triumphantly. “So you admit there is a relationship to break up!”

Newt’s mouth flapped uselessly.

“Ahem.” Hermann composed himself, adjusting his suit. “Forgive me. It is always… gratifying… to beat you at logical deduction.”

“You’ve never beat me at logical deduction.”

“I wasn’t the fool who went and got possessed by a Kaiju.”

Newt hacked out a laugh. And what may have been a lung.

“Too soon?” Hermann asked. “I’m not… I’m not skilled at the art of joke-making, so…”

_What about the art of love-making?_ No. No, no, no. Newt was not going there. He wasn’t getting his hopes up, not unless Hermann unzipped those tweedy pants of his, put a condom on his dick and hauled Newt’s scrawny ass onto it. 

Well, shit. Now Newt had a hard-on. Thankfully hidden beneath the blanket, but still. He squirmed.

“At any rate, I digress. As I was saying, the psychiatrist only suggested dissociation as a symptom of, and not a cause of, what occurred to you. Not that you would’ve been any more responsible for the dissociation, even if that was what it was!” Hermann briefly glowered at Newt again, only to slump wearily when Newt shrugged. “She also recommended that I drift with you regularly, to help stabilize your psyche and accustom you to the Kaiju’s absence. She had said that you might be…” Hermann trailed off, uncommonly hesitant.

“Lonely,” Newt finished for him. “She said I might be lonely. Who is this psychiatrist, by the way? I could use her. She’s brilliant.”

“Kamala Ramachandran. She’s like Mako, sort of. Similar personality. She _also_ said you would take a while to get used to being, er, on your own. Up there.”

“Just like you got used to being on your own…” Newt gestured slyly at Hermann’s crotch. “…down there?”

Hermann went red.

“Wow. You’re blushing. You only ever blush when I disprove your equations.”

“You’ve never disproved my equations. Merely improved them.”

“Now that’s a compliment! Were we doing nerdy foreplay, all these years? For shame.” Newt was blushing, too. He could feel it. “Hermann. You shouldn’t have to wait for me to be put back together. _You_ shouldn’t have to put me back together. I’m a dumbass. Or a disturbingly evil mastermind. Or both.” Newt’s blush was fading, thank god. “I don’t get to have you. I shouldn’t.”

“Newt. Look at me.”

_It hurts to look at you_. So, naturally, that was exactly what Newt did. His innate masochism had gone way past the sexual and into the realm of the downright spiritual. At this moment, for example, looking at Hermann—at Hermann’s sweet, radiant _faith_ —hurt like looking directly at the sun.

“We are always becoming. Until the day we die, we’re becoming.” Hermann gripped Newt’s hands tightly enough to bruise. “You’re still becoming, Newt. For a while, you were becoming something else, but now you can go back to becoming you.”

Newt closed his eyes. “Don’t—don’t trust me. Don’t _hope_ for me. It’s—it’s too much. I don’t deserve it.”

“We don’t decide what we deserve, Newt,” Hermann said implacably. Terrifyingly. “Fate does.”

And with that, Hermann leant closer to kiss Newt. Or Newt assumed Hermann was kissing him, because of the soft, exquisite brush of Hermann’s lips against his own. Newt didn’t have the courage to open his eyes.

But he did open his mouth, hungrily, helplessly, not because of courage but because of sheer, soul-shattering need. He was a coward, and this was a coward’s kiss, undeservingly greedy. Each second of sweet clinging felt like a theft, like something he was stealing from Hermann, delicious and wrong and _necessary_. Newt leaned into it, into the slowly blossoming heat of Hermann’s mouth, tilting forward until he was suddenly tilting backward, because Hermann was pushing Newt back onto the bed, his fingers tangling in Newt’s hair. 

A throat cleared behind them.

But Hermann _didn’t stop kissing him_. Hermann, apparently, didn’t even notice. Hermann, the same crotchety, nagging complainer who railed against every barely-audible creak of the lab’s coolant pipes, was now so absorbed in a kiss that he couldn’t hear a thing.

Newt pushed—lightly, then firmly, and then with veritable slaps to Hermann’s shoulders—until the oaf retreated.

“Newt…?” Hermann sounded dazed. It was annoyingly cute, so cute that Newt had to resent it a little. Fuck Hermann and the rainbow he rode in on. Honestly.

“There’s somebody else in the room, dickhead,” Newt gritted out, desperately thinking of _not_ thinking of Hermann’s dick, and succeeding with flying colors the instant he heard Jake Pentecost’s voice. It was more effective than a chastity belt.

“When you’re done with your, uh, reunion,” said Pentecost Junior with palpable amusement in his tone, “maybe we could, er, debrief? Not literally,” Pentecost added hurriedly. “Not debrief _literally_. I mean, you guys can, absolutely, but I, um. I’ll be back. Later.” A pause. “Much later.”

Pentecost departed with a heavy tromping of combat boots, followed by the swishing of the door.

Newt just lay there, his eyes still squeezed shut.

“Newt,” Hermann said eventually, with a frankly unfair amount of tenderness. Seriously, if tenderness were a fabric, this would be a flannel several feet thick. “Open your eyes.”

“Nope. I refuse to bear witness to a world in which a Pentecost saw us boning.”

“We weren’t boning.”

“We were boning with our _mouths_.”

Hermann skated his lips over Newt’s closed eyelids, unbearably light. “Want to bone with the rest of our bodies?”

“Oh, god.” Newt fumbled unseeingly for Hermann’s bony frame, yanking it back down atop his. “Yes.”

 

* * *

** fin. **

**Author's Note:**

> Like my writing? Want updates and sneak previews? Follow my [fandom](http://saucefactory.tumblr.com/) blog and my [original gay fiction](http://dominiquefrost.tumblr.com/) blog, both of which are on Tumblr!


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